Saturday, 8 February 2014

Inserting pictures and logos into a Word document is usually a right old faff, because they keep disappearing off the page, resizing themselves and re-formatting themselves.

I had to help my little girl put five photos on a page for her geography homework project, we downloaded five suitable ones from the Internet and did a nice layout using Excel in the space of five minutes; we set all column widths and row heights to one centimetre as a guide, and used the cells beneath the photos to type in the captions.

Conditional formatting, pivot tables and all that, awesome, it's just a question of realising you are in a situation where you might need them and then how to apply them. I'm sure most of us (including me) only use about 1% of Excel's myriad functions and add-ons.

Yep, not just you. Spreadsheets in general are great. Good ones, like Excel, can be used for word processing, database work, calculation, programming and layout. If I was only allowed one piece of software on my computer, I would choose a spreadsheet.